This paper investigates if the location choices made by immigrants when they arrive in the United States are influenced by the interstate dispersion in welfare benefits. Income-maximizing behavior implies that foreign-born welfare recipients unlike their native-born counterparts, may be clustered in the states that offer the highest benefits. The empirical analysis indicates that immigrant welfare recipients are indeed more heavily clustered in high-benefit states than the immigrants who do not receive welfare, or than natives. As a result, the welfare participation rate of immigrants is much more sensitive to changes in welfare benefits than that of natives

The lore of the immigrant who comes to the United States to take advantage of our welfare system has a long history in America's collective mythology, but it has little basis in fact. The so-called problem of immigrants on the dole was nonetheless a major concern of the 1996 welfare reform law, the impact of which is still playing out today. While legal immigrants continue to pay taxes and are eligible for the draft, welfare reform has severely limited their access to government supports in times of crisis. Edited by Michael Fix, Immigrants and Welfare rigorously assesses the welfare reform law, questions whether its immigrant provisions were ever really necessary, and examines its impact on legal immigrants' ability to integrate into American society. Immigrants and Welfare draws on fields from demography and law to developmental psychology. The first part of the volume probes the politics behind the welfare reform law, its legal underpinnings, and what it may mean for integration policy. Contributor Ron Haskins makes a case for welfare reform's ultimate success but cautions that excluding noncitizen children (future workers) from benefits today will inevitably have serious repercussions for the American economy down the road. Michael Wishnie describes the implications of the law for equal protection of immigrants under the U.S. Constitution. The second part of the book focuses on empirical research regarding immigrants' propensity to use benefits before the law passed, and immigrants' use and hardship levels afterwards. Jennifer Van Hook and Frank Bean analyze immigrants' benefit use before the law was passed in order to address the contested sociological theories that immigrants are inclined to welfare use and that it slows their assimilation. Randy Capps, Michael Fix, and Everett Henderson track trends before and after welfare reform in legal immigrants' use of the major federal benefit programs affected by the law. Leighton Ku looks specifically at trends in food stamps and Medicaid use among noncitizen children and adults and documents the declining health insurance coverage of noncitizen parents and children. Finally, Ariel Kalil and Danielle Crosby use longitudinal data from Chicago to examine the health of children in immigrant families that left welfare. Even though few states took the federal government's invitation with the 1996 welfare reform law to completely freeze legal immigrants out of the social safety net, many of the law's most far-reaching provisions remain in place and have significant implications for immigrants. Immigrants and Welfare takes a balanced look at the politics and history of immigrant access to safety-net supports and the ongoing impacts of welfare. Copublished with the Migration Policy Institute

In this volume, Lisa Sun-Hee Park investigates how the politics of immigration, health care, and welfare are intertwined. In this book, Park delves into one of the front lines of the battle over the boundaries of citizenship and nation and the meaning of social rights.

Covers the period 1946-1989.

This volume analyses the effects of immigration on welfare spending by focusing on the political alignment of voters and the corresponding welfare policies of governments.

In many respects, the United States remains a nation of immigrants. This is the first book length treatment of the impact of the 1996 welfare reform act on a wide range of immigrant groups in North America. Contributors to the book draw on ethnographic fieldwork, government data, and original survey research to show how welfare reform has reinforced socio-economic hardships for working poor immigrants. As the essays reveal, reform laws have increased the social isolation of poor immigrant households and discouraged large numbers of qualified immigrants from applying for health and welfare services. All of the articles highlight the importance of examining federal policy guidelines in conjunction with local enforcement policies, labor market dynamics, and immigrant attitudes toward government agencies.

How immigration influences popular concepts of citizenship and civic trust

"Why do some governments try to limit immigrants' access to social benefits and entitlements while others do not? Through an in-depth study of Sweden, Canada, and the Netherlands, Immigration and the Politics of Welfare Exclusion maps the politics of immigrants' social rights in Western democracies. To achieve this goal, Edward A. Koning analyzes policy documents, public opinion surveys, data on welfare use, parliamentary debates, and interviews with politicians and key players in the three countries. Koning's findings are three-fold. First, the politics of immigrant welfare exclusion have little to do with economic factors and are more about general opposition to immigration and multiculturalism. Second, proposals for exclusion are particularly likely to arise in a political climate that incentivizes politicians to appear "tough" on immigration. Finally, the success of anti-immigrant politicians in bringing about exclusionary reforms depends on the response of the political mainstream, and the extent to which immigrants' rights are protected in national and international legal frameworks. A timely investigation into an increasingly pressing subject, Immigration and the Politics of Welfare Exclusion will be essential reading for scholars and students of political science, comparative politics, and immigration studies."--

Lofty sentiments notwithstanding, the United States has consistently sought to exclude impoverished immigrants from entering the country on the grounds that many become dependent on social welfare institutions. Leif Jensen thoroughly explores the nature of poverty and public assistance utilization among immigrants to the United States during the years 1960 to 1980. Among the questions he explores are: Has there been an increase in the level of poverty and the degree of public assistance utilized by immigrants to the United States during the past twenty years? How do these levels compare to those for native-born Americans and across key racial and ethnic groups? How do individual and family characteristics affect the propensity of families to be poor or to receive public assistance? Following an introduction to the study as a whole, Jensen presents theoretical issues that bear on differences in poverty and welfare use. He reviews U.S. immigration history with particular emphasis on those aspects that are relevant to poverty and the receipt of public assistance. The chapters that follow review methodological issues, then present the results of Jensen's empirical analysis; two chapters focus on poverty at the family level and two consider public assistance utilization. These chapters build a conceptual background for a multivariate model of poverty at the family level. Because the mere propensity to receive public assistance is only one aspect of the welfare burden imposed by a particular group, the author also examines the absolute amount of public assistance received. Finally, he synthesizes the key findings of his empirical analysis, drawing conclusions regarding the pervasiveness of poverty and actual public assistance receipt among new immigrants. Jensen's thorough analysis and provocative conclusions make this book essential reading for those interested in sociology, demography, economics, and political science.